The great wealth thus acquired had
enabled him to defy those who knew that he was not entitled to the
fortune, and that the real heirs were in far-away France.
He had prospered like the bay tree. His daughter, Marie Louise, had
married a distinguished English nobleman, and his sons were now the
richest men in America. Yet they lived with the sword of Damocles over
their heads, suspended by a single thread, and the General had the knife
wherewith to cut it. Lespinasse, among other things, had caused the
murder of the husband of Madame Luchia, and she was in possession of
conclusive proofs which, at the proper moment, could be produced to
convict him of his many crimes, or at least to oust his sons and
daughter from the stolen inheritance.
It was a weird, bizarre nightmare, no more astonishing than the novels
the Lapierres had read. America, they understood, was a land where the
rivers were full of gold--a country of bronzed and handsome savages, of
birds of paradise and ruined Aztec temples, of vast tobacco fields and
plantations of thousands of acres of cotton cultivated by naked slaves,
while one lay in a hammock fanned by a "_petite negre_" and languidly
sipped _eau sucree_.
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